What a state of things where we have to fear installing software, and rely on vendors to scan things ahead of time, because our supply chain is such a mess and our tooling is so incapable of (and uninterested in) protecting us.
What would it take to not fear installing software? This isn't a npm problem, its a computing problem in general. Spaces like this are generally pretty against any sort of restrictions or limitations being put on computers under the name of safety (see Manifest v3)
For libraries, I like the Gnu Affero Public License. If you run the library in software with that license, you have to publish all the source of the entire project that incorporates it.
No corporation could tolerate this, though, so the library vendor can negotiate a commercial license of their software for appropriate fees.
That said, corporations are not going to want to negotiate fees with 100's of vendors over constantly fluctuating dependencies in their software.
This is why the next big language/software ecosystem needs to integrate payments to vendors in their repository system. That way, commercial license management can occur between the ecosystem owners and the corporate customers and all the vendors get paid their fair share.
Similar to Amazon's Dynamo API, whatever the next big language/ecosystem is needs to be designed around _billing_ and automatic license management for # of deployments, seats, call volumes, etc.
> This is why the next big language/software ecosystem needs to integrate payments to vendors in their repository system. That way, commercial license management can occur between the ecosystem owners and the corporate customers and all the vendors get paid their fair share.
I don't think this idea is going to go anywhere.
If a package is available for free, on convenient licensing terms, developers will use it.
If you make them pay, many developers will prefer to just build it themselves. Coding agents make that easier than ever.
Buying a package involves a lot more paperwork – it needs to go through procurement – and introduces new risks, e.g. what if the vendor increases their prices
There are potential exceptions – software with really advanced algorithms (e.g. solvers for optimisation problems); safety critical software; software needing regulatory certification (e.g. there are some Australian government APIs they won't let you call unless you've hired an auditor to certify the software you are calling them with, and the relevant government agency has approved the auditor's report) – but those exceptions are relatively rare, and the existing solutions are arguably adequate to handle them
I also think it is different for packaged SaaS applications [0] because there the buyer isn't a developer, it is someone non-technical, and "use a coding agent to build it yourself" isn't within their comfort zone or risk appetite (at least, not yet).
[0] conflict of interest disclaimer: work for a SaaS vendor
I don't disagree with you that freely distributed software on conveniently licensed terms is going to be the go-to stance for the majority of solo and non-commercial developers.
I just believe I could arrange the universe such that I get to have my cake (commercial licensing) and eat it too (with default open source licensing).
It is my experience that corporations do pay handsomely for software they use, even SaaS ones as the cost of doing business. Open source communities need mechanisms for funding that are consistent and low friction.
This is why the software language/repository/platform itself needs to facilitate license tracking and billing for alternative commercial licenses, to make it easy for corporations.
A successful new language effort that provides this facility need not be an enforcer except to say if an enterprise is willing and signed up to pay for any dependencies it uses, it is obligated to pay for all of them with something like AGPL 3 as the poison pill they have to swallow otherwise if they distribute or serve from any copyleft software.
Having simple, consistent rules that vendors and consumers have to follow with no rugpulls will be important for market acceptance. Having voluntary compliance with license terms will also be important to not turn people off from the ecosystem and to let them kick the tires. If software vendors want to distribute only unencumbered free and open source, then god bless 'em, they should be able to do it.
This makes me think whether npm (and other registries) should apply security requirements based on ecosystem impact. Example a package having millions of downloads can have special security measures enforced.
If everyone starts applying cooldowns, won't it postpone the problem? So now there is a considerable amount of users who are affected and someone from the affected group discovers the infection and reports it.
But if everyone will be delaying updates, won't be there less chances to catch it in time? I'm not fully sure if it's possible to preventively scan all NPM packages or how much compute it would require.
I think the idea is that it gives a bit of time for the companies which run automated scans of new versions to run through and detect any issues with new versions before users install them en-mass.
>If everyone starts applying cooldowns, won't it postpone the problem?
There are still research firms who are actively and aggressively scanning new packages once they are pushed. For example socket.dev pulls new packages across ecosystems and performs automated analysis and runs it in a sandbox. We don't have to have them go boom in someone's production repos to find out there is a problem.
Also as an upstream, if your "coworker" releases a strange package without discussing the changes with the broader maintenance group, you might notice after 3-48 hours, but probably not within the hour unless you happened to be online.
And if every malware developer worth their salt now introduces code to "wait out" that period of time, we're back to square one.
This assumes that they employ clandestine enough techniques that you have to actually install, wait and observe the behavior for longer than the cooldown period in order to detect this, because the code is "obfuscated" enough to evade static analysis of the code. It's anti-virus / anti-anti-virus 101 all over so to speak.
The good thing I suppose is that it raises the bar. Your regular "virus generator" script kid (sorry: supply chain attack generator script kid) can no longer pull this off.
Most automated analysis isn't dependent on just behavior, but rather suspicious things in the code itself. You have a popular open source package with files that exist on pypi but not github then that's a big flag, or if a similar package suddenly has some base64encoded garbage that runs through an obfuscated exec call. In other words the simple fact that the project has obfuscated code is enough to flag for further attention.
That said if the only issue is time, researchers will just run their automated analysis through machines with dates in the future alongside their normal tests.
Cat and mouse like the sibling says ;) Like if you start changing system time, I'll keep a log of system time to detect any "jumps" and then "behave normally" if I detect this. Of course I'll run the code that does this through "my obfuscator".
The thing with cat and mouse based on time is that this now became a default. I rather liked my odds when malware authors assumed that the defaults were that dependabot updates right away. If the general consensus online seems to be 7 days, then I'll set my dependabot to wait 10 days, so on average I'll catch even things people report over a weekend. Now that the default is a longer time period, I have to change my time period to be even longer, which actually increases my risk in another way: I'll stay vulnerable to _actual_ vulnerabilities vs. supply chain attacks for longer.
> I'll keep a log of system time to detect any "jumps" and then "behave normally" if I detect this.
This makes no sense, the system clock would be set before the suspect package is even pulled down. There isn't a "jump" just a reboot and system start at a "totally real" point in time.
And the premise is that this package can evade detection of its suspect code by using an ever-increasing amount of odd code? Yeah, that's a hard strategy.
A cat and mouse game at least raises the bar for the exploit. The status quo requires no attempt at obfuscation at all. It also makes it harder for such an exploit to turn into a worm, since developers have time to notice their credentials have been stolen and pull any malicious packages pushed using them. (and such worms hitting popular packages have so far been how most people have been exposed to this risk).
Publishing publicly then applying cooldowns in projects is much easier tgan establishing a new standard for pre-release security testing versions that works across ecosystems and gains zooling support.
Releasing secure software is the right thing to do. We only release insecure software because we need the eyeballs to make it secure.
If we believe the point made above that the many eyeballs are not that important then releasing before we have done everything to make the software as secure as possible is irresponsible.
The cooldowns effectively make the initial push into the package repository into a pre-publishing step. It's pretty much isomorphic with what you're suggesting.
> But if everyone will be delaying updates, won't be there less chances to catch it in time?
No: the security assumption behind cooldowns rests on security scanning parties, not on innocent users being victimized. Three days is a short cooldown, but it should be a good enough lead for scanning parties.
> I'm not fully sure if it's possible to preventively scan all NPM packages or how much compute it would require.
It’s not that much data, particularly for parties that are directly financially incentivized to be the first to report malware.
I generally try not to name the companies directly, because I don’t want to give them free advertising. But you can look up e.g. the recent Shai Hulud campaign.
> Just post one link of a "supply chain" problem that was prevented by any of these companies before it went into the wild and affected users.
This is not the claim being made, since cooldowns are not widely adopted at the moment.
Well, yeah. There’s no package police that’ll stop you from installing malware. The argument has never revolved around that; the argument is solely that cooldowns are effective if you use them, and timely detection by third parties is strong evidence of that.
I gave Shai Hulud as an example above. If you want precise timeline examples that demonstrate the efficacy of cooldowns, here’s some examples I collected last year[1].
(See the “Window of opportunity” column in the table.)
Most of the malicious ones just curl something in a postinstall script, scanners already catch that. The sneaky ones don't look malicious until they run, and three days may not help.
I don't think that HNers understand the recent supply chain attacks very well at all. I also don't think they realize the tests the SCA/package providers do to all the major packages.
Almost all these attacks try to reach out to external sites to steal your data. That is exceptionally hard to hide in any meaningful way.
When you're running from a bear on a hiking trip you just have to be faster than your friend. So just set your cooldown slightly longer than everyone else's cooldowns. The cooldown will give security researchers some time to scan the packages so it's still good.
I agree, it’s just the wrong approach. As a user, there’s no way to know if a package has been audited during the cooldown by some generous cybersecurity firm before you pull it in, it’s just wishful thinking. Minimizing your dependencies is a more effective strategy against supply chain attacks.
Unless you are a big enough target, there is still potential value to this. Is your business worth enough for someone to spend a lot of money hunting bespoke vulnerabilities? If not, your main risk is being swept in a vulnerability affecting a common dependency, and eliminating the common dependencies removes that risk.
The way to guarantee that is to pay one of those cybersecurity firms, that's basically their business.
And the most effective strategy is to audit and review your dependencies and any updates to them. That probably constrains how many you can have, but just minimizing them is reducing the size of the target, not protecting it per se.
I really hate dependabot making generic security people at work so pushy about updates updates updates. They seem to just be dogmatic about whatever dependabot says, forcing churn even when the documented issues are clearly not relevant. I’m not sure how to handle it politically. I’m convinced that updating so much more often is worse, not better.
I’ve mainly handled it by pushing my team to be extremely conservative about what dependencies we take, especially if they pull in scads and scads of transitive dependencies.
This elegantly mitigates three problems in one go: update churn, dependency hell, and supply chain attack surface.
It also, frankly, tends to make the code easier to understand. I’m not a huge NIH person but I do have to say that a lot of packages these days tend to encourage ways of doing things that are unnecessarily complex. More than once I’ve replaced a dependency with homegrown code and reduced LOC in the same commit.
I don't know if all ecosystems are as bad as node is, but the node ecosystem has terrible issue severity ranking which makes infosec squeamish for no reason.
Every week or so there's a new High+ "vulnerability" that gets published against our dependencies and I have to go look at it to confirm that it's yet another case of "it's possible for someone to give this dev-only tool a bad regex that would cause the test runner to OOM on that branch".
I keep getting things like "denial of service when the SCSS or whatever parse is given malicious input”. Great, that's part of the build chain, all of its inputs are stuff we control. Why do we care.
As a sysadmin I'm in the same boat. I've unfortunately never worked with security folks that seemed to have any sysadmin or dev experience. Whether or not this is universal, idk, and I have no idea what they are teaching in these security courses. But I'm tired of security teams telling me "you need to implement these 230 group policies this quarter" or whatever. They don't seem to grasp the externalities of a request like that and how much fucking work it is to vet, test, deploy, monitor, verify, etc. 80% of the time, they don't even know what they do or if it's even impactful for us.
As a previous sysadmin that does stuff in tangently related things to security (not the security person that makes these rules) I agree. The rules they come out with to address issues in operating systems that haven't been deployed in 10 years blows my mind.
"Ya, Windows something ancient had an issue with WevDAV 2 decades ago, but that is not a reason to block the http DELETE verb at the WAF"
> I’m convinced that updating so much more often is worse, not better.
The issue of cooldowns aside (which is about delaying updates, not reducing their frequency): you're going to have the same set of problems when you update, whether you do it frequently or infrequently. The difference is that if you update frequently, you'll have a smaller set of updates (so it's easier to debug) and you'll have more opportunity to report issues upstream and fix them in a timely fashion.
It's the same underlying problem as CI and build time. Most people abandoned the concept of projects that take so long to build you can only do testing once a week, because CI that runs on every PR provides a much better experience. This is the same lesson applied to updates.
My logical read of the situation is that I end up making fewer overall changes if I end up upgrading a dependency once, not thrice, to a specific version. And the changes are their own source of risk.
In reality, one massive update is too big to digest and it never happens. So you're stuck on out-of-date packages having lost the ability to update.
That's never a problem until it suddenly is. Company is put at significant risk (courts want to reason by analogy and "engineers skipped maintenance and endangered people" is an easy one) and nobody is to blame since nobody owned the task.
I think that’s the response the “it’s never a real problem until suddenly it is” observation was trying to head off.
There’s always someone who doesn’t want to take the advice of all the people who’ve been burned because “well it’s never happened to me.” I used to be that someone myself. Until the day it happened to me.
For most things in life that hit us periodically, we try to buffer them into manageable amounts so that when we address them, we do them all at once, benefiting from “economy of scale”, instead of having to constantly work on addressing everything that comes our way immediately. With package updates, however, another consideration is security: the longer you wait to release a security update, the more users may be vulnerable to it.
There’s no right answer. Every case is different, trying to impose a single rule for everyone just simplifies things beyond what is reasonable.
I've seen a similar benefit enforcing a 1 year instead of 3 year TLS cert lifetime limit in the past. It forces more automation and stronger processes.
Delaying non-security updates has the benefit of not wasting a team’s time when something regresses and is fixed in a quick follow up patch. Having to report issues upstream is not free.
I wonder what sort of security people allow dependabot in the first place. Like does it live in total isolation, or do they manually review every update for it? I guess from a risk management perspective if you're not required to review packages for compliance reasons then it will make great sense, but it's still security by luck.
> I’m convinced that updating so much more often is worse, not better.
It depends on what the updates are. If the update deals with a security risk it's better to update. If not then I would agree with you for the most part.
Of course the best dependency compliance policy is to have no, or at least as few as possible, external dependencies. In our setup running a dependabot would almost always bring more external dependencies into our pipeline than it would monitor. Don't get me wrong, dependabot's 11 or so dependencies are rather trustworthy, but they are still not fun to deal with when you have to write NIS2 compliance documentation explaining why you have them for each tiny update,
It's essentially blowback from the number-one security problem being out of date software with known vulnerabilities. It's also easy to measure without deeper knowledge of the system, so it gets focused on to the detriment of strategies based on deeper analysis and reducing overall attack surface.
Watching language package managers reinvent everything distribution package managers have been doing since the 90s has been as fun as watching crypto people reinvent financial regulation.
But updates to broken packages are still allowed: if a new version is pushed within the three days, it does not reset the cool-down. You just get a pull request to update to a known-bad version instead.
This seems to be primarily an issue with a few specific package management solutions that have suffered SCA vulnerabilities recently, not generaly across the board.
It’s rational to feel much safer in the Java packages ecosystem, where pinned versions are the default and the norm, and packages cannot run any install-time scripts.
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[ 0.22 ms ] story [ 48.1 ms ] thread[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44434355
The grandparent’s point remains the same, the software ecosystem and its supply chain or however you want to call it is a hot mess.
What would it take to not fear installing software? This isn't a npm problem, its a computing problem in general. Spaces like this are generally pretty against any sort of restrictions or limitations being put on computers under the name of safety (see Manifest v3)
No corporation could tolerate this, though, so the library vendor can negotiate a commercial license of their software for appropriate fees.
That said, corporations are not going to want to negotiate fees with 100's of vendors over constantly fluctuating dependencies in their software.
This is why the next big language/software ecosystem needs to integrate payments to vendors in their repository system. That way, commercial license management can occur between the ecosystem owners and the corporate customers and all the vendors get paid their fair share.
Similar to Amazon's Dynamo API, whatever the next big language/ecosystem is needs to be designed around _billing_ and automatic license management for # of deployments, seats, call volumes, etc.
I don't think this idea is going to go anywhere.
If a package is available for free, on convenient licensing terms, developers will use it.
If you make them pay, many developers will prefer to just build it themselves. Coding agents make that easier than ever.
Buying a package involves a lot more paperwork – it needs to go through procurement – and introduces new risks, e.g. what if the vendor increases their prices
There are potential exceptions – software with really advanced algorithms (e.g. solvers for optimisation problems); safety critical software; software needing regulatory certification (e.g. there are some Australian government APIs they won't let you call unless you've hired an auditor to certify the software you are calling them with, and the relevant government agency has approved the auditor's report) – but those exceptions are relatively rare, and the existing solutions are arguably adequate to handle them
I also think it is different for packaged SaaS applications [0] because there the buyer isn't a developer, it is someone non-technical, and "use a coding agent to build it yourself" isn't within their comfort zone or risk appetite (at least, not yet).
[0] conflict of interest disclaimer: work for a SaaS vendor
I just believe I could arrange the universe such that I get to have my cake (commercial licensing) and eat it too (with default open source licensing).
It is my experience that corporations do pay handsomely for software they use, even SaaS ones as the cost of doing business. Open source communities need mechanisms for funding that are consistent and low friction.
This is why the software language/repository/platform itself needs to facilitate license tracking and billing for alternative commercial licenses, to make it easy for corporations.
A successful new language effort that provides this facility need not be an enforcer except to say if an enterprise is willing and signed up to pay for any dependencies it uses, it is obligated to pay for all of them with something like AGPL 3 as the poison pill they have to swallow otherwise if they distribute or serve from any copyleft software.
Having simple, consistent rules that vendors and consumers have to follow with no rugpulls will be important for market acceptance. Having voluntary compliance with license terms will also be important to not turn people off from the ecosystem and to let them kick the tires. If software vendors want to distribute only unencumbered free and open source, then god bless 'em, they should be able to do it.
Sandboxing and auditing built into the software from the start. Browser Extensions solved this ages ago.
> Only advisories reviewed by GitHub trigger alerts.
From https://docs.github.com/en/code-security/concepts/supply-cha...
Maybe I'm misunderstanding, but this means I now need to submit to GitHub Security Advisor to get my security fix out ASAP?
If you want GitHub to tell people about your security fix, someone needs to tell GitHub about it.
AFAIK they mostly pull from the normal sources like NVD automatically, but you can also submit to them directly.
But if everyone will be delaying updates, won't be there less chances to catch it in time? I'm not fully sure if it's possible to preventively scan all NPM packages or how much compute it would require.
The majority were noticed by maintainers or third party groups noticing things like releases not tied to a source tag, many rapid releases, etc.
Cooldowns won’t stop everything, but it makes a malicious release significantly more likely to be noticed
There are still research firms who are actively and aggressively scanning new packages once they are pushed. For example socket.dev pulls new packages across ecosystems and performs automated analysis and runs it in a sandbox. We don't have to have them go boom in someone's production repos to find out there is a problem.
This assumes that they employ clandestine enough techniques that you have to actually install, wait and observe the behavior for longer than the cooldown period in order to detect this, because the code is "obfuscated" enough to evade static analysis of the code. It's anti-virus / anti-anti-virus 101 all over so to speak.
The good thing I suppose is that it raises the bar. Your regular "virus generator" script kid (sorry: supply chain attack generator script kid) can no longer pull this off.
That said if the only issue is time, researchers will just run their automated analysis through machines with dates in the future alongside their normal tests.
The thing with cat and mouse based on time is that this now became a default. I rather liked my odds when malware authors assumed that the defaults were that dependabot updates right away. If the general consensus online seems to be 7 days, then I'll set my dependabot to wait 10 days, so on average I'll catch even things people report over a weekend. Now that the default is a longer time period, I have to change my time period to be even longer, which actually increases my risk in another way: I'll stay vulnerable to _actual_ vulnerabilities vs. supply chain attacks for longer.
This makes no sense, the system clock would be set before the suspect package is even pulled down. There isn't a "jump" just a reboot and system start at a "totally real" point in time.
And the premise is that this package can evade detection of its suspect code by using an ever-increasing amount of odd code? Yeah, that's a hard strategy.
Of course this is an arms race, but the time setting inside the sandbox doesn't need to be the same as outside.
If it is not about that and we still subscribe to Linus's law then cooldowns will just postpone the problem.
If we believe the point made above that the many eyeballs are not that important then releasing before we have done everything to make the software as secure as possible is irresponsible.
No: the security assumption behind cooldowns rests on security scanning parties, not on innocent users being victimized. Three days is a short cooldown, but it should be a good enough lead for scanning parties.
> I'm not fully sure if it's possible to preventively scan all NPM packages or how much compute it would require.
It’s not that much data, particularly for parties that are directly financially incentivized to be the first to report malware.
All package malware related news I see are related to users being affected by it (then security firms do their analysis whatever) ...
Just post one link of a "supply chain" problem that was prevented by any of these companies before it went into the wild and affected users.
Simple.
> Just post one link of a "supply chain" problem that was prevented by any of these companies before it went into the wild and affected users.
This is not the claim being made, since cooldowns are not widely adopted at the moment.
Do you have an example of those things you're alleging?
(See the “Window of opportunity” column in the table.)
[1]: https://blog.yossarian.net/2025/11/21/We-should-all-be-using...
I don't think that HNers understand the recent supply chain attacks very well at all. I also don't think they realize the tests the SCA/package providers do to all the major packages.
Almost all these attacks try to reach out to external sites to steal your data. That is exceptionally hard to hide in any meaningful way.
Example:
https://snyk.io/blog/node-gyp-supply-chain-compromise-self-p...
Before that we had event-stream, then we had XZ compromise.
It’s not exceptionally hard to delay reaching out to external sites until after a cooldown period.
Build provenance, maintainer alerts on new releases, tying releases to specific git tags, etc all help.
The men see the tiger, one scrambles to run and the other starts putting on their shoes
"Why are you putting on shoes? You'll never outrun the tiger"
"I don't need to, I just need to outrun you"
And the most effective strategy is to audit and review your dependencies and any updates to them. That probably constrains how many you can have, but just minimizing them is reducing the size of the target, not protecting it per se.
This elegantly mitigates three problems in one go: update churn, dependency hell, and supply chain attack surface.
It also, frankly, tends to make the code easier to understand. I’m not a huge NIH person but I do have to say that a lot of packages these days tend to encourage ways of doing things that are unnecessarily complex. More than once I’ve replaced a dependency with homegrown code and reduced LOC in the same commit.
Every week or so there's a new High+ "vulnerability" that gets published against our dependencies and I have to go look at it to confirm that it's yet another case of "it's possible for someone to give this dev-only tool a bad regex that would cause the test runner to OOM on that branch".
"Ya, Windows something ancient had an issue with WevDAV 2 decades ago, but that is not a reason to block the http DELETE verb at the WAF"
The issue of cooldowns aside (which is about delaying updates, not reducing their frequency): you're going to have the same set of problems when you update, whether you do it frequently or infrequently. The difference is that if you update frequently, you'll have a smaller set of updates (so it's easier to debug) and you'll have more opportunity to report issues upstream and fix them in a timely fashion.
It's the same underlying problem as CI and build time. Most people abandoned the concept of projects that take so long to build you can only do testing once a week, because CI that runs on every PR provides a much better experience. This is the same lesson applied to updates.
That's never a problem until it suddenly is. Company is put at significant risk (courts want to reason by analogy and "engineers skipped maintenance and endangered people" is an easy one) and nobody is to blame since nobody owned the task.
There’s always someone who doesn’t want to take the advice of all the people who’ve been burned because “well it’s never happened to me.” I used to be that someone myself. Until the day it happened to me.
There’s no right answer. Every case is different, trying to impose a single rule for everyone just simplifies things beyond what is reasonable.
> I’m convinced that updating so much more often is worse, not better.
It depends on what the updates are. If the update deals with a security risk it's better to update. If not then I would agree with you for the most part.
Of course the best dependency compliance policy is to have no, or at least as few as possible, external dependencies. In our setup running a dependabot would almost always bring more external dependencies into our pipeline than it would monitor. Don't get me wrong, dependabot's 11 or so dependencies are rather trustworthy, but they are still not fun to deal with when you have to write NIS2 compliance documentation explaining why you have them for each tiny update,
The attack vector is generalized.
https://gist.github.com/mcollina/b294a6c39ee700d24073c0e5a4e...